favicon.ico is a file to put on the root of an website, Internet Explorer and Firefox will show it on the address bar and favorite/bookmark. Mine are down there, a piece of Tiramisu:

.ico is an Windows Icon file, however it can be seen on Firefox across platforms. It was, originally, proposed and developed by Microsoft, then become the de facto standard with support from Mozilla.

Mozilla proposal for website icon that require <link rel=”icon” /> on header of every html file is still limited on Mozilla products.

The funny thing is Microsoft never put a favicon.ico on their website. Even if they did put one later God-knows-when, they put an icon of white sheet.

I guess they are planing registering the folded sheet as trademark. Oh please don’t.

… is that we are already invaded by aliens come from Keron Planet without knowing.

Another translation from me. NASA – JPL Solar System Simulator in Chinese (Taiwan). I did it years ago.

With proper settings, Images can be breath-taking. Try it yourself.

To sum up, there are two solutions for php to connect MySQL server using the correct charset. When the connected in wrong charsets, all non-latin1 characters becomes question marks.

This is the correction to the previous post.

The first solution is to put the following lines in my.cnf under [mysqld] session. Works on both MySQL on Win32 and Linux.

default-character-set = utf8
default-collation = utf8_unicode_ci
skip-character-set-client-handshake


The first two lines changes MySQL default to what the charest needed, and the third one ask MySQL to ignore what libmysql said about the charset – which always attempts to connect with latin1 charset.

This is the solution in MySQL5 CJK FAQ and it’s recommends for everyone with their own machines.

It’s can also be done by re-compile libmysql which is technical advanced and the I-don’t-know-how-to-do-it-so-don’-ask method.

For people did not have control over their MySQL-PHP environment but facing wrong charset connection all the time, you must add following line after every mysql_connect() in PHP scripts.

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'UTF8'");
mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET UTF8");


This is kind of annoying and is required even in the programs you downloaded. WordPress is included and should be added in wp-db.php.

This image was taken using Lu-Lin LOT, then combine colours (R-V-B) with MaxIm DL 4.

My target was NGC5461, but turnout it was too small. Also being a new student on telescopes, I couldn’t remove bright dots cause by cosmic ray.

LOT is the biggest telescope in Taiwan.

From today, users of Windows Live Messenger can add their Yahoo! Messenger friends as contacts. One must join the beta program to enable the function.

I done that before I realise that I have no friends using Yahoo! Messenger which is popular among the teens (<18yrs-old). Does that means I am … old?